Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to address you. I would especially like to thank, Dr. Robin Street and her students for having the bravery, innovation, and passion to mount this campaign. There is no greater effective method of growth than when we learn from friends, from people who you trust, who you spend time with, who across these months and years, you have experienced the ecstatic high of success or the painful prick of failures, be it inside the classroom or in other parts of your lives. Over the next few days, you will be treated to a number of events designed to focus your attention on the importance of experience and valuing difference. If you take advantage of these events, if you pull yourself away from your previous perceptions and actual unnecessary commitments, you should feel growth. Growth is experienced in many forms—we can feel the brilliant lightning strike of enlightenment and epiphany and we can feel the painful solitude of learning that what we have always known to be true, may not be. We will joyfully learn that the ideas and perceptions of others carried from our lives and communities are not quite as comprehensive as we thought. Over the next few days, we will learn that people are much greater than they appear and that they offer us so much. But like everything, we cannot experience the elevated without stretching our attention and opening our minds and spirits. I know we live in a busy world where each moment of every day is accounted for but for a few days, step onto a different gauge to ride a different train. You will be the better for it. So, when one creates a complex gift for growth, we must take a moment to acknowledge the people who spent months creating this experience. These are your peers and they are sharing their knowledge and capabilities with you. They could have contented themselves to hold such knowledge to themselves, but they chose not to and so we are actually quite grateful. The sessions this morning and the sessions over the next few days have been crafted to expand your horizons. They are designed to enrich and and expand. The students who have carefully created a comprehensive experience have adopted what I would call is an anti-deficit approach. Engaging in difference and diversity does not assume, a priori, that people are bad, or intentionally biased, or that certain people are meaner than others. These are not effective methods and the students know this. Consequently, they have decided to create a full bodied program where you will be engaged in many ways and through many methods. Addresses, workshops, creative sessions, and equally crucial, spaces where people speak and share their stories. These next few days are opportunities and not demands. Hats off to you, my dear colleagues, these actions on behalf of equity will impact the people who attend beyond current calculable measure.
Personally, I must again thank you, dear students, for what you did for me. Your small but not insignificant gifts to me pushed me out of the dark spaces of insecurity as it relates to my work. Allow me to explain for the rest of the audience and I think that it serves as a perfect frame for our discussion today. Many of you may know that I am dedicated to the project of equity and ending discrimination. It is my passion and my life’s work. I secure and apply all of my intellectual strengths to these goals. As sometimes happens, people are threatened with change and are incorrectly sure that when you push for power and visibility for others, you surely must be taking away the power and visibility of some. While this is simply untrue and I will speak about this in a moment, I was the subject of a public ad hominem attack which cut across my soul in lasting ways. I wondered whether I was supposed to be in this space and whether my actions mattered. I was brought to my knees and as you have already and will discover, your truest friends and those that value your efforts will come to your rescue. That happened but something equally special happened. I received a folder from the Dr. Street containing small but powerful notes about my work. As I sat quietly in my office and turned each note over, I was re-energized and re committed. Each narrative of doubt regarding the efficacy and potential of my equity and collaborative work pinging around in my mind was countered by the kind and simple notes hand written by you. I am in your debt and it is what we do for each other. In addition to the quiet but extremely impactful act, I realized that these notes came from individuals who both do and do not share my life experiences, perspectives, faith, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, regional identity or a host of other aspects of my self. In truth, these acts exemplify the main point of the conference and that is, that in learning about and experiencing diversity, no one is trying to convert, censor, or alter you. That isn’t the goal. In fact, and for the rest of my comments, conducting and engaging in diversity is about becoming your best and highest self. That is right. Let us reflect on this concept. What does it mean to be the best that you can be? To maximize your potential as a professional, citizen, community member, and friend?
To quote Dr. Street’s opening and initial comments in the publicity leading up to these events—we need to pause. I am a big fan of pausing. In fact, as outlined by Dr. Street, pausing is the only way that we can contentedly engage in diversity. Is also the only way that we can reach our best and highest self. Pausing is not easy to do. Are you pausing right now or are you thinking about the last or next moments? Let’s practice. Fastest way to pause is to take a deep breath. I know this is odd, but let us step out from our usual crazy paces, look up, clear out the mind and pause. This is the way we prepare ourselves for transformative change. We pause. Following Dr. Street’s call, we need to hit pause on our unproductive ideas about each other. And when we hit pause, what do we do next? We understand that in order to be our best and higher selves we must make a difference. And how do we make a difference? The answer is obvious–we engage with difference. Make sense? Yeah, uh huh. Why must we engage with difference? Because in countless primitive ways, difference has been used to divide, served as an excuse to marginalize, exclude, and brutalize. Difference has allowed us to retreat, and retract our compassion, and restrict our best selves to our tribes. But let us imagine an elevated and advanced world. Let us imagine a space where difference and its supposed anxieties subside and we trade them in for the exhilaration of something new to us. We see difference through the prism of elated wonder. We understand our very life blood is dependent on the uniqueness of each and everyone of us. We do not choke instead, we cherish on different presentations and perspectives. Imagine difference not as an unexpected shock but a comforting current.
For the rest of my time, I would like to provide some easy techniques to most effectively make a difference by engaging with difference. The first step is to prepare yourself. Radical transformation requires that we first reflect upon ourselves. I am asking us to question the ways in which we understand difference or diversity to be something that exists apart from ourselves. So, are we implicitly but incorrectly suggesting that we are somehow less complex and therefore, more understandable than others? Take a moment to consider the different aspects of yourself which make up the totality of your being. Could you reduce yourself and explain yourself in a few short perceptions or stereotypes? I should think not. If we are a made up a world of selves and we place stock in logic, if we are complex and different in rich and engaging ways, should that axiom not also apply to those whom to us are unfamiliar? Engaging in difference is often initially done incorrectly because we only see difference beyond ourselves. Let us remember to bring the lens in more closely and recognize all the different part of ourselves that we value, that we cherish, that without, we would not be ourselves.
Another crucial way to prepare ourselves for engaging in difference so that we can make a difference is to initially encounter difference in ways that make us feel good. One way is through music and foodways. No doubt all of us love our music and our food. And we know that diversity’s richness is carried along nourishing notes and noshes. I have often wondered why it is that we easily reach for the food and music of others and yet we fear the actual existence and communities of those who created that which fills the belly and spirit. Can we really separate the way food and music make us feel, the way it satisfies, and not draw the link that the people who created them are responsible? Perhaps we might be able to think about this. When you do this be careful to honor and revere and avoid either pretending that the food and notes do not come from these communities or appropriate or bastardize them to suit your own needs. The simple way to become comfortable with difference is to recognize that through food and music you are already engaging. Try transferring the joy and moving experiences onto the people who created them.
Another crucial way to effectively prepare yourself to make a difference by engaging with difference is to fully commit yourself to doing so. What does that mean? That means that before entering into spaces where difference exists, understand the reasons why you should engage. Let us understand, a priori, being kind to people is the right thing to do. Let us also take as a given that valuing people and their right to exist, possess sovereignty of mind, body, and spirit, and having equal access to opportunities and resources. But taking something as a given does not mean that it exists in the recesses of our mind, it means that it sits right in the front of our minds, always. Not just when we are comfortable and not when it suits our needs or aims or motivations. Full stop.
Accepting that, let us think about the other reasons why we should fully engage in this work? Here comes a tennis or softball pitching machine list: Let’s start with brain science: We need difference. Our bodies and minds crave and are sustained by difference. We need variety, we need to encounter difference in order to secure our places in our own lives, we need challenge to fortify our own ideas, we need different perspectives to grow our minds and capacity. Without difference in the form of ideas, people, perspectives, experiences, we become sick. WE BECOME SICK. We become bored. We become depressed. We become listless. We become angry. True.
Here is another reason. Without equity for all, there is equity for none. One cannot have more equity than others. While we may believe this to be true, in fact, it’s a false statement. Let’s throw this statement out and let’s mull it over—if one is oppressed, we are all oppressed. Now let’s dive deep, if we are doing the oppressing, we are also oppressed. Try that one on for size. I am sitting in a room of thinkers so let’s unpack this a bit with a less complicated statement. If not consciously, we know from the deepest fibers of our being that when we hurt others, we hurt. True? True. What causes us to hurt others? We have been hurt and when we hurt others, we tumble into a hopeless cycle where we are both the injurer and injured. Now let us draw the microscope back a bit—who do we hurt? Sometimes we hurt the people that have hurt us and sometimes we displace onto others in the forms of stereotypes, racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and other oppressive ideologies. It’s easier than dealing with our own stuff. I have been in this work a long time and I have watched and learned a great deal about why people not only refuse to engage with people different from them, they irrationally become hostile to them. Now, I am no psychiatrist and maybe I am mistaking my own PhD for an M.D. but I spend a great deal wondering how we got to the place where we dislike entire groups of people? I argue that it starts with the injured self who seeks the scapegoat to project their hurt and anxieties and injuries onto. And like a snowball gathering more snow and energy as it hurtles down a hill, the mind engages in, what I term, injury slippage whereby one simple painful interaction whose causal injury cannot be undone is slipped onto another person or group of people who, in their bodies or beliefs, we have labeled as different. It is not safer, wholly unproductive because we don’t get out of the original hurt, we expand and exacerbate it.
Here is another reason to engage in difference. Welcome to the world. How’s that one for you? This is the reality and it’s a wonderful one. This world is not one filled with consensus or similarities. No two of anything—be it people, plants, or perspectives, are the same. Truly, when we encounter difference as it relates to different identities, bodies, and ideologies, you are not in danger. You are living. Encountering difference is to encounter a vibrant world. Let’s try and see it that way. How liberating this is. How securing this is.
Next, before we engage in difference, conduct some prep work. Do we ever really undertake any serious endeavor without first educating ourselves? Others should not be our only sources of understanding and engaging with difference. Apply the techniques that you are learning in your courses to educating yourself about difference. Conduct some background research. I am guessing since we are sitting in Meek, a space dedicated to journalism, may of you like to read the news. You are engaged by the stories-they interest us, horrify us, challenge us, make us feel better. As we educate ourselves about the worlds which we live in, we might want to raise our radars to the ways in which we are learning about difference. How can we make a difference if we don’t understand the ways in which difference impacts our lives for the best and the worse? As any solid intellect would lean towards, avoid resting on impressions and anecdotes. You wouldn’t purposely differently impact anything without first conducting research, would you? You also wouldn’t expect one person to provide all the knowledge on a particular group, perspective, or ideology, would you? So let’s try and avoid this and instead, find out the best sources for issues related to the challenges of today’s society or the challenges felt by certain groups of people and read up. Making a difference means engaging in difference fully prepared.
Next, figure out which aspects of difference you’d like to make a difference in. And let’s be clear, you can commit to many. Because we are capable and complex and because encounter so much difference, closely and from afar, there is a lot of room to make a difference. What are the issues that are close to you? What are the issues that matter to you? How to decide. Try to sit still and think about your values. What guides your morality? How would you define good as it relates to your actions and interactions? Let the emerging answers serve as your compass. Also, try to reflect on what aspects of life impact you. Analyze an ordinary day and consider what sparks a reaction of fear or compassion. What small interactions or large events move or stand you still? These answers can serve as a guide map for how you can both engage in and make a difference.
Another solid way to engage in difference to make difference is to measure your words. With tremendous respect to those of you who like to talk, and I stand among you, have you noticed how much senseless chatter exists? Have you ever felt exhausted because you have engaged in a conversation that didn’t reap much? A dear friend of mine used to refer to people who stood around only talking were jawboning. Who doesn’t love a good gab fest? Who doesn’t love to pontificate on things we know a little about or not? And these are great ways to pass the time away. Making a difference means being conservative with your words. It means selecting the words that are the most productive, do the least harm, and are deeply intentional. Useless or harmful words can lead to blockages and injury.
Also, to effectively engage in difference, consider developing the skill of meaningfully listening. I think we can all agree that for some reason we prefer to be heard rather than to hear. How can we learn about difference, how can we make a difference if we cannot hear each others’ words expressing their differences, their different obstacles and strategies, and their different joys and successes? Let us still our impulse to react, to be triggered, to argue, to find the flaw, to kill change. Instead, let’s listen for the pathways forward. Can you imagine moving forward without listening? And let me be clear we listen beyond our ears. Listen for the cues people give. Listen for the body language. Listen for the injury. Listen for the power. Listen for the opportunity to make a difference. That my friends, is meaningful listening and will lead to meaningful change.
Engaging in difference to make a difference is to accept and work through any discomforts you may have about other people who live differently than you. Try to avoid universalizing your experiences. Not everyone has experienced the world in the same ways in which you have, so naturally, they will have different perspectives about their worlds. Try to practice the concept of empathy. Empathy is a very important concept and it is one that will be quite effective as you move through this world trying to make positive changes. Practicing empathy can be easy and it can be challenging. I always like to put empathy in this way. It is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes not your shoes on somebody else. To engage in difference that resonates with you is not that challenging but try to avoid making assumptions about people just because they share certain qualities or perspectives or life experiences. Try to avoid conceptual leaps because they create comfort for you. For people who are different from you, lean on a the natural instinct to practice empathy. To effectively do this, consider the world from the perspective that they share with you. Explore and understand their worlds.
Engaging in difference to make a difference means to sometimes step out of your comfort zone. I am interested in the ways in which people think that is so difficult, but you do this everyday as a student and as an individual moving through this world. Embrace the difference. To make a difference, you truly must engage. To do so, you need to accept that your previous training may serve you in many ways and of course as in any other endeavor, you made to acquire new skills and ways of thinking along the way. Where do these new skills and knowledge rest, in the minds and actions of people different from you. Investigate the ways that people understand and approach and think about their lives and see if their approaches significantly impact your life in positive ways and consider sharing your successful and peace bringing methods to them. Engaging in difference to make a difference is a two-way highway. When trying to make a difference, also avoid paradigms of charity or maybe even concepts of service. Consider framing your experiences with others who you know and don’t as collaborations. Engaging in difference to make a difference means considering the notion and accepting the fact that when we offer our strengths to others, they are offering them to us. Avoid judging people along good or bad lines. This won’t be very productive in your efforts to make change.
Engaging in difference to make a difference also means to accept the successes that you have achieved. Many people fail to recognize that success in making a difference is a journey and a process. Their will be stumbles and misunderstandings along the way. You may make serious mistakes and others may commit serious errors against you. You may at times feel that you have felt unsafe or made others feel unsafe, perhaps challenge or have been challenged in ways that make you comfortable. Allow yourself and others trying to make a difference and trying to get to know difference, the opportunities to recover. Don’t make assumptions that because someone fails to value an idea or perspective or life experience they are bad people. They are not—they may be nervous or have knowledge gaps or different perspectives. Allow people to recover and share their perspectives. Two simple ways through this. First is: if you have erred, apologize. As many of you have previously heard me say, a lot can be accomplished through an apology. Hit that button: “I am sorry.” It really does work to combat discomfort or mistakes. Also, if you have erred and you are unclear about where you have erred, ask the individual to explain the misstep. And if you have felt aggrieved, be brave enough to, with compassion, explain where the gap widened. Finally, find out how to repair any damage done and do not forget to take those steps. Following this process benefits, you–it reduces your anxiety and trains you to be better at making a difference in future moments.
Another important idea to consider: when engaging in difference, again let me stress that people aren’t trying to fix you, or convert you, or fundamentally change your beliefs. This is one of the major misconceptions about diversity and difference—that somehow certain groups are considered essentially bad or wrong. This is not diversity, this is division. If you feel yourself sliding into these spaces or feeling yourself boxed into these positions. Engage in dialogues and avoid assumptions. When someone who has a different life experience or subscribes to values different from yours, try not to judge or rank their ideas or positionalities. Often in the silence of misunderstanding or perhaps when we reach a challenge, instead of collaboratively working through difference, we create imagined fictions—these are impressions or ideas that we invent when we don’t have all the narratives. Most times, when we are challenged, these fictions are not productive and are often incomplete and factually incorrect. Avoid inventing narratives about people and issues, instead ask more questions and commit yourself to engaging and not avoiding.
Engaging in difference is not always an easy path, an enriching one yes, but find ways to see through differences that at first appear to create roadblocks. After what do we do with actual road blocks? We find ways to navigate around them or, in fact, the closer we get, we realize they weren’t blocks at all, we just presumed them to be. Be prepared to recognize the successes along the way. A singular fact about making a difference through engaging with difference is that the tasks appear daunting and at times, insurmountable. They are not. Find, recognize, and acknowledge the successes when they appear. Engaging in difference has often been viewed as challenging because we think we need to solve the problems of difference quickly and without bumps and scrapes. Understanding engaging with difference through the lens that it is a path fraught with challenges often blinds us to the successes we make.
Perhaps most crucial of all, know your power and accept your responsibility. I simply cannot stomach one more statement about entitled generations and students. It simply is not what I see and frankly, it cannot be true. I don’t live and won’t imagine a world where the younger generation does not feel compelled to make change for a better the world they are maturing into. So dismiss those who are fatigued or who have failed and would tell you that you cannot make change. Don’t believe them. The truth is that many of our most sustained successful engagements with difference are conducted by the youngest generations. Know your power and know your weaknesses. Reflect on your strengths and challenges, where you are full and where there are voids. Amplify and advance your skills and compensate and eliminate your challenges.
Believe that there are no small acts when you engage in making a difference. In fact, I would submit that impact of many small acts is infinitely greater than a large gesture. Every interaction with another human is an opportunity to make a difference. While the context of a protest, a vote, a meeting, or an event are wonderful and effective, never underestimate the ways in which through our daily actions we can make monumental differences. Let’s reference the butterfly effect and if, in your thinking, you move to horror movies, let’s interrupt that impulse for a moment. The butterfly effect is something that I am firmly committed to and have seen it happen more times than I can count. Born from chaos theory, (don’t you love it and isn’t it fitting?) the butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Scientists, meteorologists, and even science fiction writers have made much use of this concept in their research and writing. Less so, have the humanists. Let us champion the butterfly effect when we engage in difference, when we are making a difference. Small and perhaps imperceptible acts can lead to magnificent and fantastic change. So I am arguing that you don’t have to wait only for the events or changes requiring critical mass. Sometimes, let us narrow our focus and our goals to more of a plus one paradigm. If we can make a difference in one moment, with one person, with one issue, let us term this a success. And when we conduct a full cost accounting analysis of impact and difference making, I am guessing the advancement will be astounding.
So here we have arrived at the end of my comments. I have spent a great deal of time expounding on the spaces and places we need to be in to successfully make and engage with difference. This afternoon and for the next few days, put these techniques into practice. I do not recommend that you approach this as a chore for it is not a mundane or bland task—how can making a difference or engaging with difference ever be boring? These are opportunities to better yourself and to feel the satisfaction of having made differences in a world that is improving and still needs more. This world is a magnificent place and provides us with great opportunities to expand our minds and spirits. I am convinced that the only way to do this is to engage with others who are different from us. For generations, people across this nation and land have been working to make the world a better place, to solve some of our most complex challenges, so that all of us may enjoy a richer and more satisfying life. In closing, view these next few days as opportunities to prepare yourself to join the thousands of folks, past and present, known and unknown. Learn from these sessions, keep and open mind, acknowledge enlightenment and take joy in learning others’ stories, investigate your own discomforts, and revel in the growth that happens when you encounter difference. And when you complete these sessions, put what you have learned into practice. You have so very much to offer and we have been waiting for you. Thank you.